The British painter, critic, and novelist Wyndham Lewis was a monster of intolerance – yet Walter Sickert once called him “the greatest portraitist of this, or any other time”. What is more, an exhibition of Lewis’s portraits at the National Portrait Gallery reveals that Sickert was very nearly right.

I dislike everything about Lewis, and, if you want to know why, all you have to do is glance at his famous self-portrait Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro (1920-21). In it the artist looks out at us with an expression somewhere between a sneer and a snarl.

Curling his upper lip to bare his teeth, he swivels his hard and suspicious eyes round to fix us with an angry glare. The face is made up of flat planes and sharp angles. The points of the chin, cheek and nose look like knives.

more from The Telegraph here.

Steve Fuller in Project Syndicate:

We need the humanities only if we are committed to the idea of humanity. If the humanities have become obsolete, then it may be that humanity is losing its salience.

I do not mean that we are becoming “less human” in the sense of “inhumane.” If anything, we live in a time when traditionally human-centered concerns like “rights” have been extended to animals, if not nature as a whole. Rather, the problem is whether there is anything distinctive about being human that makes special demands of higher education. I believe that the answer continues to be yes.

Today, it sounds old-fashioned to describe the university’s purpose as being to “cultivate” people, as if it were a glorified finishing school. However, once we set aside its elitist history, there remains a strong element of truth to this idea, especially when applied to the humanities. Although we now think of academic disciplines, including the humanities, as being “research-led,” this understates the university’s historic role in converting the primate Homo sapiens into a creature whose interests, aspirations, and achievements extend beyond successful sexual reproduction.

What was originally called the “liberal arts” provided the skills necessary for this transformation.

Over at NYPL Live:

Colum McCann meets with Michael Ondaatje at a very public fireplace.

Come hear these two best-selling authors—both of whom are often spoken of as “international mongrels” in the sense that their backgrounds and their range of literary influences are cast extraordinarily wide. “We get our voice from the voices of others,” says McCann, “and Ondaatje has long been a hero of mine.” This is a fireside chat that promises to be offbeat, informal, unrehearsed and thrillingly passionate.

The video can be seen here.

Paul Ehrlich in Seed:

We do not understand how cultures evolve nearly so well. The majority of human evolution does not involve changes in our DNA, but rather alterations in the gigantic library of nongenetic information, the culture, that our species possesses. This library is orders of magnitude larger than that of our genetic information, and the elements on its diverse shelves usually have meaning only in connection with other elements. Indeed, there has been a long, bitter debate about whether it is sensible even to use the term evolution to describe changes in culture. After all, culture is composed of overlapping phenomena from languages, religions, institutions, and socially transmitted power relationships to the information embodied in artifacts ranging from potsherds to jumbo jets. The study of cultural change encompasses not only the disciplines of biology and the social sciences, but areas of the humanities as well.

Despite the great difficulties of building a comprehensive theory of cultural change deserving of the label of “evolution,” progress in that direction has begun. We are finally starting to understand the patterns of culture change and the role of natural selection in shaping them. And since everything from weapons of mass destruction to global heating are the results of changes in human culture over time, acquiring a fundamental understanding of cultural evolution just might be the key to saving civilization from itself.

In recent years, scientists have developed a novel theory of what falters in the depressed brain. Instead of seeing the disease as the result of a chemical imbalance, these researchers argue that the brain’s cells are shrinking and dying. This theory has gained momentum in the past few months, with the publication of several high profile scientific papers. The effectiveness of Prozac, these scientists say, has little to do with the amount of serotonin in the brain. Rather, the drug works because it helps heal our neurons, allowing them to grow and thrive again.

In this sense, Prozac is simply a bottled version of other activities that have a similar effect, such as physical exercise. They aren’t happy pills, but healing pills.

These discoveries are causing scientists to fundamentally reimagine depression. While the mental illness is often defined in terms of its emotional symptoms – this led a generation of researchers to search for the chemicals, like serotonin, that might trigger such distorted moods – researchers are now focusing on more systematic changes in the depressed brain.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Pity the penguin. Darling of the animal world in the wake of March of the Penguins’ success in 2005, penguin fever quickly begat penguin fatigue. First, the film’s makers went and accepted their Oscar for best documentary carrying penguin stuffed animals. Then Hollywood inundated the market with penguin-centric films including Happy Feet, Surf’s Up, and Farce of the Penguins. The story of adorable birds with strong familial bonds on the desolate Antarctic landscape was universally appealing. But, as with most things adorable, enough finally became enough.

This is probably why Werner Herzog opens his new documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, with a caveat: If the U.S. National Science Foundation — which sent Herzog to Antarctica — had been expecting a penguin film, it would be sorely disappointed.

more from The Smart Set here.

Charles McGrath in the NYT:

In many ways “Dancing” is an almost perfect piece of Internet art: it’s short, pleasingly weird and so minimal in its content that it’s open to a multitude of interpretations. It could be a little commercial for one-world feel-goodism. It could be an allegory of American foreign policy: a bumptious foreigner turning up all over the world and answering just to his own inner music. Or it could be about nothing at all — just a guy dancing.

However you interpret it, you can’t watch “Dancing” for very long without feeling a little happier. The music (by Gary Schyman, a friend of Mr. Harding’s, and set to a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, sung in Bengali by Palbasha Siddique, a 17-year-old native of Bangladesh now living in Minneapolis) is both catchy and haunting. The backgrounds are often quite beautiful. And there is something sweetly touching and uplifting about the spectacle of all these different nationalities, people of almost every age and color, dancing along with an uninhibited doofus.

Children, not surprisingly, turn out to be the best at picking up on Mr. Harding’s infectious vibe. There’s frequently a grown-up, on the other hand — especially one in the front row of a crowd — who tends to ham it up and make a fool of himself.

The other remarkable thing about the “Dancing” phenomenon is that it is, to a very considerable extent, a creation of the Internet. It doesn’t just live, so to speak, on the Web; it was the Web that, more or less accidentally, brought it into being.

From Scientific American:

How did space and time come about? How did they form the smooth four-dimensional emptiness that serves as a backdrop for our physical world? What do they look like at the very tiniest distances? Questions such as these lie at the outer boundary of modern science and are driving the search for a theory of quantum gravity—the long-sought unification of Einstein’s general theory of relativity with quantum theory. Relativity theory describes how spacetime on large scales can take on countless different shapes, producing what we perceive as the force of gravity. In contrast, quantum theory describes the laws of physics at atomic and subatomic scales, ignoring gravitational effects altogether. A theory of quantum gravity aims to describe the nature of spacetime on the very smallest scales—the voids in between the smallest known elementary particles—by quantum laws and possibly explain it in terms of some fundamental constituents.

Superstring theory is often described as the leading candidate to fill this role, but it has not yet provided an answer to any of these pressing questions. Instead, following its own inner logic, it has uncovered ever more complex layers of new, exotic ingredients and relations among them, leading to a bewildering variety of possible outcomes. Over the past few years our collaboration has developed a promising alternative to this much traveled superhighway of theoretical physics. It follows a recipe that is almost embarrassingly simple: take a few very basic ingredients, assemble them according to well-known quantum principles (nothing exotic), stir well, let settle—and you have created quantum spacetime. The process is straightforward enough to simulate on a laptop.

To put it differently, if we think of empty spacetime as some immaterial substance, consisting of a very large number of minute, structureless pieces, and if we then let these microscopic building blocks interact with one another according to simple rules dictated by gravity and quantum theory, they will spontaneously arrange themselves into a whole that in many ways looks like the observed universe. It is similar to the way that molecules assemble themselves into crystalline or amorphous solids.

More here.

Masum Chisty. Untitled.

Installation.

More on the artist here and art in Bangladesh here, and here.

Pushkin’s lexicon. There are very few neologisms in Pushkin’s work—he stands at the summit of his age. His lexicon and his prosody, anticipated by formal innovations he proceded to refine, emerged semiconsciously, the product of a well-lit field of sensitive readers coupled with the genius of the poet.

Eisenstein’s shooting script for 1905: edits, camera angles, dissolves, diagrams, all less elaborate than in The Strike (StaČka). There are only two dissolves in the entire film, and each stresses the key image: the steps filling with people, and the deck of the battleship emptying.

Dissolves economize scene exposition without feeling like its focus. The film is good because the things in it are uncluttered. I think that economy as a device is consciously utilized here—it serves as a unifier of action.

more from Context here.

If you turn from reading Tim Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life to looking at contemporary art in the galleries, you cannot but be a little disappointed. Who is our Degas, our Manet or our Pissarro- who, that is, displays the hidden political and social dimensions of our public spaces, revealing how our private desires are externalized there? Modernist high art turned inward, leaving this task to mass art. Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain (1952) shows, by comparison, how confined were the explicit social references of Abstract Expressionism. Last Fall Dara Friedman hired sixty people, children, tourists, and workers of all ages, to sing in public without accompaniment. They sang in daylight and at night, in coffee shops, on Manhattan street corners, in museums, and in Grand Central Station. Mostly they did popular songs, with a little opera, mostly lyrics about longing. Some of the performers are very good, a few sound great, but they wouldn’t attract attention in concert. Musical, a sixty-minute large screen, high definition digital video presents these performances.

more from artcritical here.

“What woods are the sturdiest, or the most visually pleasing?” Messner said. “What does a birch dam say? Everyone seems to love sugar maple, but it’s such an overfamiliar scrub tree. Would I be making a stronger statement with willow? I don’t want this to be one of those generic McDams.”

“What do I have to say—as a beaver and as an artist?” he added.

After much thought, Messner decided to reconstruct the anterior section of the dam with poplar wood on Tuesday, after he finished “highly necessary” preparatory work chewing the branches into uniform-sized interlocking sticks. Yet such tasks struck fellow lodge members as excessive.

“Get to work, get to work, build the dam, build the dam,” Cyril Kyree said as he dragged a number of logs into the shallow lick of river where the rest of the lodge has built their nests. “Chew-chew-chew. Need a mate. Build the dam.”

more from The Onion here.

There are times when art should be the last thing on an art critic’s mind. The thunderous popularity of a number of contemporary Chinese artists compels a political analysis. Much of the work is powered by a startling and completely delusionary infatuation with Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. This is more sinister than anything we have seen in the already fairly astonishing annals of radical chic. We are witnessing a globalized political whitewash job, with artists and assorted collectors, dealers, and sycophants pouring a thick layer of avant-garde double-talk over the infernal decade of suffering, destruction, and death that Mao unleashed on his country in 1966. And as we are also dealing with the house of mirrors that is the art world, I have no doubt that somebody is ready to explain that I am confusing appropriation with approbation or that fascism is just another way of spelling freedom. I must say, the theory people have a lot to answer for. But here is the bottom line: the global art world’s burgeoning love affair with Mao and the Cultural Revolution makes a very neat fit with the current Chinese regime’s efforts to sell itself as the authoritarian power that everybody can learn to love.

more from TNR here.

Former Senator Jesse Helms, friend of the likes of Roberto D’Aubisson (the founder of El Salvadoran death squads, murderer of Oscar Romero, spiritual inspiration for the rape-murder of the Maryknoll nuns) and Argentine junta head Leopoldo Galtieri, defender of Jim Crow and South African apartheid, and general philistine, is dead. In the Telegraph:

A fervent anti-Communist, his closest known foreign associate was Roberto d’Aubuisson, the leader of the El Salvadorean Right and the man identified by the State Department as responsible for the assassination of archbishop Oscar Romero while he was saying Mass.

Helms had also supported Pinochet in Chile and had been the only senator to back the Argentine junta against Britain during the Falklands war. He once advocated the invasion of Cuba and was one of the few American conservatives to back the white apartheid regimes in Southern Africa.

Helms was also known for his strong personal animosity towards President Clinton. He had been particularly incensed by Clinton’s decision – one of his first on becoming President in 1992 – to remove the ban on homosexuals in the military.

Following his election as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Helms was asked by a journalist whether Clinton was fit to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces. “No,” he replied, “I don’t and neither do the people of the armed forces.”

Two days later he compounded the damage by saying – on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination – that “Clinton better watch out if he comes down here (North Carolina). He’d better have his bodyguard.”

///
Question
May Swenson

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

without cloud for shift
how will I hide

///

From The Los Angeles Times:

In his studies of entropy and the irreversibility of time, Caltech physicist Sean Carroll is exploring the idea that our universe is part of a larger structure.

Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll has been wrestling with the mystery of time. Most physical laws work equally well going backward or forward, yet time flows only in one direction. Writing in this month’s Scientific American, Carroll suggests that entropy, the tendency of physical systems to become more disordered over time, plays a crucial role. Carroll sat down recently at Caltech to explain his theory.

What’s the problem with time?

The irreversibility of time is sort of the most obvious unanswered question in cosmology.

Time has been talked about in cosmology for many years, but we have a toolbox now we didn’t used to have.

We have general relativity, string theory, discoveries in particle physics that we can use to help us find the right answer.

What does entropy have to do with all this?

The most obvious fact about the history of the universe is the growth of entropy from the early times to the late times.

The fact that you can turn eggs into omelets but not vice versa is a thing we know from our kitchens.

You don’t need to spend millions of dollars on telescopes to discover it.

From Scientific American:

Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, is best known for his work on mirror neurons, a small circuit of cells in the premotor cortex and inferior parietal cortex. What makes these cells so interesting is that they are activated both when we perform a certain action—such as smiling or reaching for a cup—and when we observe someone else performing that same action. In other words, they collapse the distinction between seeing and doing. In recent years, Iacoboni has shown that mirror neurons may be an important element of social cognition and that defects in the mirror neuron system may underlie a variety of mental disorders, such as autism.

His new book, Mirroring People: The Science of How We Connect to Others, explores these possibilities at length. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Iacoboni about his research.

LEHRER: What first got you interested in mirror neurons? Did you immediately grasp their explanatory potential?

IACOBONI: I actually became interested in mirror neurons gradually. [Neuroscientist] Giacomo Rizzolatti and his group [at the University of Parma in Italy] approached us at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center because they wanted to expand the research on mirror neurons using brain imaging in humans. I thought that mirror neurons were interesting, but I have to confess I was also a bit incredulous. We were at the beginnings of the science on mirror neurons. The properties of these neurons are so amazing that I seriously considered the possibility that they were experimental artifacts. In 1998 I visited Rizzolatti’s lab in Parma, I observed their experiments and findings, talked to the anatomists that were studying the anatomy of the system and I realized that the empirical findings were really solid. At that point I had the intuition that the discovery of mirror neurons was going to revolutionize the way we think about the brain and ourselves. However, it took me some years of experimentation to fully grasp the explanatory potential of mirror neurons in imitation, empathy, language, and so on—in other words in our social life.

More here,

Carlin Romano in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

A hearty welcome, then, to Elizabeth Pisani, holder of a Ph.D. in epidemiology, who perfectly incarnates the link that should exist between writers and the world. The Wisdom of Whores, her rollicking, eye-opening, hilarious account of the underbelly of international AIDS research, awaits the Hollywood producer smart enough to make it into a Brangelina vehicle.

Pisani began with a leg up. She’s a former Reuters reporter in Asia who retooled herself into an infectious-diseases specialist. Having grown “tired of trying to reduce human experience to 600 words on a two-hour deadline,” she decided to leave the gung-ho foreign correspondence to her future husband, also a Reuters reporter.

But Pisani still exhibits the chops of a wire-service veteran, topped by a wry voice and the irreverent style of a ’60s New Journalist. Forget everything you’ve ever gleaned from boilerplate stories about AIDS research: The Wisdom of Whores vibrates with “I’ve been there” authenticity.

Epidemiology, Pisani explains at the outset, is “the study of how diseases spread in a population,” but, like all science, it’s much, much more: “a world of money and votes, a world of medical enquiry and lobbyists, of pharmaceutical manufacturing and environmental activism and religions and political ideologies. … ”

As she “lounged in the library’s leather armchairs” during her graduate-school makeover, an idea kept gnawing at her: that “we could save more lives with good science if we spent less time worrying about publishing the perfect paper and more time lobbying, more time schmoozing the press, more time speaking in the language that voters and politicians understand.”

“If we behaved more,” she quips, “like Big Tobacco.”

More here.

Martha C. Nussbaum in Dissent:

After a period of relative impotence, the Hindu-supremacist right in India has rebounded, with the December reelection of Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Narendra Modi as chief minister in Gujarat. Modi’s role in the mass murders of Muslims in that state in February 2002 has long been so well documented that he has been denied a visa to enter the United States. Recently, moreover, extensive corroboration of his role was elicited by a hidden-camera inquiry conducted by the news-magazine Tehelka. Despite overwhelming evidence that he is a mass murderer extraordinaire—or perhaps, because of it—Modi defied media predictions, and even exit polls, to win by a landslide, a victory in which fund-raising and politicking by Indians residing in the United States (40 percent of Indian Americans are Gujarati) played a large role. Because the rival Congress Party, which controls the central government in a coalition, understands well the intense hatred of Muslims that animates many Gujarati Hindus, leading politicians tiptoed around the issue of sectarian violence, hoping to defeat the BJP in Gujarat on its weak economic record. Only Sonia Gandhi, courageously and repeatedly, denounced Modi’s reign of blood. (American Gujaratis responded with an e-mail campaign denouncing Gandhi in abusive language.) Hitler is revered as a hero in school textbooks in Gujarat. In Modi, those who worship at that shrine seem to have found the type of leader they seek. Let’s hope that the nation as a whole does not embrace his charismatic call to hate.

More here.